If Y2K happened today, it would be far, far worse • The Register
Comment Twenty-five years ago on January 1, despite panic and fear that the world was soon to collapse into chaos, nothing much happened.
Sure, there were issues that hint at the global catastrophe that the Y2K bug might have been, but most, including The Register rolling over to “year Zero,” were worth little more than a chuckle.
That said, the fact Y2K rose to little more than a footnote in the annals of the information age is largely due to the hard work and diligence of armies of IT professionals who spent years working out the best way to deploy a relatively simple fix to computers around the world. If not for the herculean effort with which they greeted a potentially sisyphean task, we might have been way worse off.
The Y2K problem was actually pretty straightforward to fix: At its core, it was a practical choice – driven by awareness of memory constraints – made by computer programmers in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. They built their systems with little regard for what would happen when the world entered a new millennium – they coded all those legacy systems with two-digit year dates, meaning when the year changed from 99 to 00, systems could interpret the change as a return to 1900 – not 2000.
Expanding year fields to four digits resolved the issue, but implementing this fix was a complex and labor-intensive process. Patch management wasn’t as easy then as it is now.
Just be glad Y2K happened a quarter of a century ago
Looking back at El Reg’s coverage of the aftermath of Y2K, you’ll notice a trend: Small, isolated incidents.
Auckland Airport in New Zealand said it wasn’t having any problems in a blog post dated January 1 in the year 100, similar to the way many websites displayed dates in the early days of the new millennium (e.g., the year 3900 showed up, as did 19100, 19200 and 4000 and ***DATE INVALID***). Instead of reading zero, some sites with millennium countdowns reset to indicating the year 2000 wouldn’t come for 1,901 more years, and webmail services were reporting incorrect dates, too.
Again, all those issues were minor – the email systems functioned normally, flights stayed in the air, lights were still on, and the world kept moving. Chances are good that, were we to dig into the postmortem of all those little issues we’d find a lot of IT admins with eggs on their faces for not responding to the need to patch things.
When Y2K hit, there was no AWS, no online streaming services, smartphones, or social media: Sure, we had the internet, but the world was nowhere nearly as constantly online as in 2025. Today, in the era of microservices, XaaS, edge computing, and “smart” tech reaching as far as connected air fresheners and cat litter boxes, the results could actually be catastrophic.
Y2K was largely a simple fix, but it had to be nipped in a lot of places
“Y2K was largely a simple fix, but it had to be fixed in a lot of places,” Danny Brian, Gartner distinguished VP analyst covering IT operations and software, told The Register in an interview. “Things were much simpler in 1999.”
Brian was in the early days of his career as a developer when Y2K loomed large, and he described an IT community that came together to solve a fundamental problem in a way that meant the media flurry and panic amounted to nothing but sound and fury.
“We spent months planning and had many community gatherings between various companies,” Brian told us. “We all were up all night [at the new year] to be there in case anything was overlooked … but it was a very communal rally to get behind something we wanted to prevent.”
Success wouldn’t be assured in the modern era of computing.
Device proliferation + managed services = more risk
As noted above, patch management is challenging, and has only become tougher in the past 25 years. Endpoint management firm Adaptiva said last year that the average organization is now managing close to 3,000 pieces of software, all of which need to be kept up to date. Unfortunately, 69 percent of the IT teams Adaptiva surveyed said that’s all but impossible.
Peruse the cybersecurity section of this website and you’ll likely notice that many of the most exploited trends are old vulnerabilities that resurface to wreak havoc. That, unfortunately, suggests yet again that we’re in an era where keeping the near-countless pieces of business-essential software patched is, unlike fixing a date issue in the year 1999, truly sisyphean.
The Y2K bug dragged a fundamental flaw in computing to the forefront of public consciousness – but in an age when the desktop was still dominant, computing was still local and internet-connected doodads were just a science fiction dream.
Beyond worrying about managing patches for the devices and software that IT teams manage today, Brian pointed out another fundamental issue that might make a modern Y2K harder to deal with: Almost everything is a service in 2025.
If Y2K happened today, most of the problems would exist in the platforms we’ve come to depend on
“Most organizations have moved past addressing problems in their own code,” Brian said. “If Y2K happened today, most of the problems would exist in the platforms we’ve come to depend on.”
Not that it’s all bad – Brian noted that we likely wouldn’t have had 25 years of explosive growth in computing power if we were still dealing with the resource constraints that contributed to Y2K. On the flip side, “we would be at the mercy of the big platforms to fix something like Y2K” were it to happen today, Brian said.
“It’s good Y2K happened when it did, really,” Brian said. “If a vendor failed to patch something [as important], or couldn’t for whatever reason, that would be catastrophic.”
The prospect of such a fundamental issue in 2025 is unsettling – the mere whiff of such a bug would likely send markets into freefall and businesses scrambling to figure out how to rapidly inventory everything that might need patching.
Not that such a thing is or will happen – this isn’t a prediction of looming chaos. It is, however, an invitation to look back at a global effort that was largely successful in all but a few situations, and think what we could learn from it 25 years on.
Just think about how much more drastically a missed patch – or reliance on vendors to handle the essential parts of business operations – could affect our modern connected world. Got it? Good. Now let’s all kick off the second quarter of the century by taking steps to be sure we don’t end up with another Y2K that is far worse than the last one. ®
